Stern has a cow

People will need to turn vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.

In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.

Hold on. If we eat less beef, pork and poultry, we’ll be eating a lot more beans, broccoli and cabbage, and producing a heck of a lot more methane ourselves.

Which would make taking public transportation even more unpleasant for Lord Stern (and everybody else) – if he takes public transportation, that is.

Stern wants to raise the price of meat to a point where we all turn vegetarians:

Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.

And then there’s the redistribution of wealth from rich countries to poor ones: Lord Stern

warned that British taxpayers would need to contribute about £3 billion a year by 2015 to help poor countries to cope with the inevitable impact of climate change.

If you think your soy diet will save you from Stern’s scheme, think again:

UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy.

The basic idea is that people and animals are “bad for the planet.” Malthus is back in fashion, after all.

Well, since someone else started this I’ll point out that I agree that something needs to be done. I don’t really like the taste of meat but I do like the idea of killing them. Something along the lines of Eddy from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.